A few days ago the Croatian architecture scene amazed us with their pavilion for the Venice Biennale. And there’s more coming from this country: House of Tolerance, a 4 week international workshop at the School of Architecture in Split, Croatia, has been announced. The workshop is open to students and young professionals (up to 35 years old), and will result in the new House of Tolerance for the city. The winning proposal from the workshop will be proposed to the city mayor, to build the first stage of the project.

Based on the idea of Mirage, described at the wikipedia as a naturally occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky, the team that designed the Croatian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale decided to create a floating pavilion to present arts and architecture of Croatia at the Venice Biennale.

Following the same principles of a Fata Morgana, which is an unusual and very complex form of Mirage that can be seen in a narrow band right above the horizon, the Floating Pavilion is constructed on an existing barge with dimensions of 10m x 20m x 3m. It is designed by a group of 14 leading Croatian architects, who have made the recent Croatian architecture visible on the global scene. Instead of working in the usual formats of their practices and presenting speculative projects, they decided to work together on a single proposal and to have it constructed and towed toward its final destination in Venice right away. The pavilion structure is the barge’ cargo, welded from 30 tons of Q385 wire mesh in more than 40 layers of varying contours. The cargo presented here maps the process of intense interaction between architects working on the common project, their collaboration with the Croatian maritime industry, and the extraordinary act of architecture it produced. Please follow the pavilion’s maiden voyage across the Adriatic over here

Vedran Pedišić, Mladen Hofmann (SANGRAD architects), and Emil Špirić and Erick Velasco Farrera (AVP_arhitekti) shared with us their winning proposal for the New Zagreb Crafts Centre Competition in Croatia. The architects presented an introverted island organized around the central public communications and spaces.

SPLIT Talks, a three day curated discussion focusing on architecture, tourism, and sustainability, will be held June 16-18 in Diocletian’s Palace in Split. The event is a coproduction of the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture at the University of Split and the architecture blog, Pogledaj.to.

The theme of this year’s Split Talks is the relationship of Tourism, Croatia’s primary economic driver, and its relation to local planning legislation as well as notions of sustainability internationally. The current slow-down in development caused by the world economic crisis as well as the impending entry of Croatia to the European Union raise important new questions, problems, and opportunities for design professionals. These issues will be explored through a series of case studies provided by guest lecturers and university faculty and through a series of round tables.

My first encounter with the new breed of Croatian architects was with 3LHD, a young firm ran by Sasa Begovic, Marko Dabrovic, Tanja Grozdanic and Silvije Novak. The partners got together while still students at the Zagreb Architecture School in 1994, and thanks to the croatian competition system they were able to do their first public works, starting with the Memorial Bridge in Rijeka (1997). After that, the firm has been involved in several public works such as a stone Sports Hall in Bale, the Spaladium Center in Lora, and their latest realizations: Zamet Center in Rijeka and the Dance Center in Zagreb. In these projects, 3LHD has been able to develop new shapes that relate to a young nation.

I really enjoyed my visit to this practice, and was very glad to see how a young practice (partners born between 1969-1971) can establish a collaborative working environment with a clear organization, that allows them to effectively manage a large team to work in different scales.

For njiric + arhitekti‘slibrary in Zadar, Croatia, the team worked with interpreting the local context as a “conflict of two matrices – the urban and suburban in the east to the west.” The new library emerges at the crossroads of these two different zones. With emphasis on the erosion of public space and an explosion of new technologies, the library becomes a series of environments with access to different activities. In this way, the library becomes a host for different purposes, for instance, “the library = market = hotel = shopping. ” The Mediterranean variant for the library is based on the density and the interdependencies between the university building, student hostels, major public buildings, and the diverse landscape structure.

njiric+ arhitekti‘s design for a large stadium has been nicknamed as the “Blue Volcano” by the public and the press, an overwhelming built form that creates a presence in the city, a new landmark for the area. The stadium was conceived not as a building typology but rather as a topography. Using the natural undulation of the landscape, the new civic arena is housed within an artificial hill made of recycled rubber and blue pigment sprayed onto corrugated aluminium sheets.

The Pavilion is approximately 24ft across and 38ft high, and is built using steel framing, with acrylic sidings and interior and aluminum siding. Inside is the dome is placeholder for video projection equipment so this can be used for multimedia exhibitions. The starting bid is US$ 100.000 and there’s a little less than a month to bid.

Randić & Turato shared their competition entry for the new Adris Group headquarters in Zagreb. The architects investigated corporate office typology and its ability to generate public space when designing the proposal. ”Instead of building a structure on the perimeter of the block, that creates a characteristic configuration with public street on the outside and enclosed private court on the inside, the concept raises the program in a structure that hovers over the existing block,” explained the architects. In this way, the ground floor is completely accessible to the public creating a covered square below the new office building. The structure is supported by our sets of large steel columns that hold the building’s independent geometries. Each of these “legs” are programmed with ground level activities while the offices are organized within a horizontal framing structure.